Letters: Wasting water on fracking

The article on the lack of drinking water for residents of Paso Robles despite the abundance available to nearby wine growers highlights why fracking (hydraulic fracturing) should not be happening at all in California. How can it be that untold millions of gallons of water are being wasted to extract natural gas from the ground when residents don't have water to drink or to irrigate with?

Just the waste of California's most limited resource should be enough argument to end this water-intensive extraction method, even before the potential for contamination of aquifers and the carbon emissions from the combustion of the fossil fuels retrieved are considered.